I think it says a lot about the tech industry in general when folks like us in our mid-to-late 30s (okay, okay, I'm about 6 weeks off 40 but that's beyond the point) feel like old grizzled veterans.

The nature of the industry also means we can get 20+ years under our belts and have damn all to show for it in terms of projects that are still live or able to be spoken about in public. Corporate firewalls, NDAs and the relentless march of new webdev tech just seem to obliterate everything we've spent years working on.

Add in the age old problem of imposter syndrome and shiny new objects and it's a recipe for disaster. I also think having technical skills can be more of a curse than a blessing when it comes to building things. Your story of your friend just shipping his Wordpress site is a great case in point. Seeing some comments talk about redoing everything in a newer language rather than building upon the project really made me smile. All too familiar!

I've cross-posted an article I wrote for my personal blog about the existential guilt of never feeling like I finished enough of my own projects over the years and how it's clearly a big problem for so many people in tech and creative fields. Seems to correlate a lot with what I've read here: dev.to/alanhylands/not-failures-ju...

Keep building. Keep launching. Keep learning. Something we all should print out and stick over our monitors!